A catastrophic event on solaris-3 referred to as “the lament” has
unleashed a cycle of destruction that is continuing with no signs of
stopping causing monsters to run rampant and some individuals to
awaken special abilities, leading to a desperate struggle for survival in
the post-apocalyptic world of Wuthering Waves an action rpg game.
the lament's power came in the form of destructive waves, bringing
forth to the lands of solaris things called tacets fields which allow for
monsters called tacet discords to have an outbreak and increase rapidly
in number across most of the regions of solaris. The destructive waves
that manifest tacet fields and tacet discord outbreaks are referred to as
the "Waveworn phenomenon", as a result of the phenomena the game
depicts a world ravaged by chaos as former human settlements and
places of work now lie in ruin with extremely damaged infrastructure
and no signs of human life, one such a place is the Port City of Guixu as
the area is filled with countless ruins like floating bottomless skyscrapers,
free way roads with massive holes that cut off the path, broken down
cars with missing parts and rusty metal etc, and all of these things having
grass and bushes growing like they are part of the infrastructure to
showcase the long duration that the cycle of the lament has been
ongoing.
To ensure the survival of the few left in the face of danger the humans
have been forced to develop technology that would help them stay safe
and take on jobs that are a response to then ongoing lament, with cities
like Jinzhou becoming fortified and being built over a large body of water
and at a high altitude, with organisations of scientists seen throughout
the city researching the waveworn and other places dedicated to the
Midnight rangers that act as the military wing tasked with fighting the
tacet discords. Throughout the uninhabited places within the region, the
Midnight rangers frequently patrol the routes that would ultimately lead
to human settlements and have set up bases outside Jinzhou to actively
prevent the discords from going to human settlements that are left and
scientists are found at ruins collecting data to further understand the
waveworn.
Among the remaining humans some became Resonators which are are
people capable of manipulating their own frequencies to exhibit
resonance abilities know as fortes and acquiring a physical tacet mark on
their bodies. These resonators are what players use to engage in the
world of Wuthering waves in a team of no more than three to fight the
tacet discords having one character on-field.
To showcase the resonators ability to work with the waves, the combat
system in the game allows players to use each character’s unique fortes
to create their own combos using the three resonators in the team
through animation cancels by using a combat mechanic of quick swaps
to utilize input buffering/input overloading, where a player can hold an
input and swap to another character to perform some action and
allowing the first character to remain on-field until their animation is
completed before disappearing, this allows players to use their own
creativity and actively think about the best rotations between the
characters to optimize forte damage by using more than one character
on-field at almost the same time which highly promotes the player’s
engagement while in combat rather than just smashing inputs.
The player is required to increase their world level through exploration
and quests to be able to upgrade weapons and resonators. To help fight
the tacet discords, scientists developed a gadget called the Pangu
terminal that collects the reverberations of defeated monsters by
transforming them to echoes to be used by resonators in battle by using
their abilities to fight other discords, these echoes are what players must
collect to increase their resonators damage stats like attack,health and
more, it is this echo building that players may feel overwhelmed as they
do not always get the stats they want leading to a player having to go
around the game regions defeating the discords and not receiving the
intended attribute.
To level up the echoes, weapons and the resonators’ forte abilities like
the resonance skill and resonance liberation as well as the forte burst,
players need to collect material from certain places within the game that
use waveplates to exhange for the material, these waveplates are
limited and reset per day meaning to fully level up everything you need
to get stronger a player would need to login into game on mutliple days
as the materials exchanged are not a enough and consume 60 or 40
waveplates out of a total of 240, compared to other games like Genshin
Impact which is also an action rpg, the materials in wuthering waves are
significantly lower leading to players having to login many days to make
sure the resonators on the team are all built to be able to defeat the
tacet discords as their levels also increase with the world level, this
system leads players to plan how they going to use their resources more
effectively and get in the habit of figuring out which is important to level
up first to be able to at least defeat a stronger a opponent even if it
would take a considerable longer amount of time which can be a skill
that is used in everyday life to use their time resourcefully and weigh out
if some things are doable without spending important resources and
develop a habit of doing things even if they are not in circumstances
they would like but can tough it out and treat them like any stronger
opponent or the low number of materials can be interpreted as a
reflection of Solaris’s struggle against the lament, in which humanity
trying desperately to survive that resources to make resonators stronger
are not in abundance but that are very rare because of the destruction
of the waveworn across the lands.
The most effective aspect of the game is the domains, these are places
where players go to collect materials in exchange for waveplates to
upgrade their gear, in Genshin Impact the domains do not open
everyday but on certain days of the week, but with wuthering waves a
player is not forced to login on specific days to level up their equipment
and this avoids a situation where they would have enough resources to
collect materials to upgrade both character abilities and weapons but
only having upgraded the weapon because the domain to get materials
for the abilities would not be open, this gives players easy planning to do
and do not feel as if you are forced to incorporate a game into your
schedule but rather login when you have time.
The least effective aspect of wuthering waves is the english voice acting
as the audio and overall tone of the actors seem to be unpolished at
best and in most cases consisting of monotonous tone which often
makes the story seem dull as the voice acting is what often helps the
story to come to life an example being the genshin voice actors carry the
emotion of the characters highlighting the theme of the quests where
players can just tell from the characters the mood of the situation having
the quests leave more of an impression on the view even if the quest
was not part of the main story line.